"You could describe the overall American military strategy of sitting hundreds of miles away and lobbing cruise missiles as being cowardly"

You could describe it this way, if your intent was to provide anti-American propaganda. Once the decision has been made to go to war, the objective is to kill as many of the opposition's combatants as you can with minimal loss of your troops and noncombatants. I see nothing remotely cowardly in using the US's technological edge.

War is not a sport, there is no requirement to give terrorists a "sporting chance" to kill US troops.

This is NOT me advocating using nuclear or bio-weapons since they create too many civilian casualties.